Currently sending email from within the Computer Science network to the campus and outside world is not restricted by our border firewall. We will be restricting outbound email connections in the next week to just the campus SMTP server (at smtp.ucdavis.edu) and to our inhouse email server, smtp.cs.ucdavis.edu.

There are two reasons for this change. First, the campus CyberSafety policies dictate that all outbound email must be virus and SPAM checked. If email can come from any host on the network, we have not ensured that proper checking has been done. By forcing outbound email through the campus' or our SMTP servers, we can ensure that checking is done.

Second, we are currently on several email block lists as a result of computers inside our network issuing SPAM to the outside world and not using our SMTP servers. Without restrictions, this will continue to happen and the CS support staff will need to continue to beg forgiveness from ISP's and ask that we be taken off the block lists.

Please check your email clients for proper configuration prior to the new firewall rules going into place. Your "outgoing server (SMTP)" should be set to either smtp.cs.ucdavis.edu or smtp.ucdavis.edu. If you are using sendmail on your local system for email delivery and SSG did not set it up, please contact support2@cs.ucdavis.edu so we may implement the appropriate changes to your sendmail server. If for research reasons you need an exception to this rule, please contact me directly so we may discuss your request. We will need to make sure that precautions are in place so that your research does not jeopardize email traffic for the entire department.

We will send a follow-up email the day before the firewall rules are changed.

Thank you for your assistance in making our network more functional.

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Ken Jones
Director of Computing Services